Photo of Mayo flag on Mount Errigal courtesy of Mayo Mick 

Only four days to go until Game 5 and the trickle of coverage has turned into a raging flood. I have to nip out for a bit shortly so what I’ll stick up here now is all that I can manage to do in fifteen or twenty minutes. Here goes.

First, there’s team news of sorts. It appears that there is something to this story about Colm Boyle not being fit to start. The Connaught Telegraph broke this one yesterday (here) and today it’s a story carried by the Irish Examiner, RTÉ (who say Boyler is “unlikely” to start) and the Irish Independent.  Lee Keegan is also mentioned in these reports too and it’s not clear if he’ll be okay to line out on Sunday either. It looks as if we won’t be naming a team until Friday or maybe even Saturday so we won’t know for sure what the story is about Colm and Lee but my guess would be that the former won’t start (with Chris Barrett replacing him) while the latter will. That’s just, however, supposition on my part.

Right, into the glut of it. The Irish Times first, where Darragh Ó Sé  makes up for that blokey pile of shite he wrote after our semi-final by setting out a more considered analysis on the final. He reckons we’ll do it. Sean Moran, meanwhile, does a Martin Breheny type of piece on our final travails down the years while there are also pieces on James Horan and Michael Murphy.

Sean Moran shouldn’t have bothered aping Martin Breheny because over at the Indo the same gent has his own tales-of-Mayo-disasters-in-finals piece. Lovely. The same organ also has a piece on Aidan O’Shea (which looks like the one The Score did on Aido the other day) and a really hilarious article in which Tommy Lyons is quoted as having a right go at Martin McHugh whom he reckons was spinning his semi-final analysis with the aim of helping his native county. It may be a case of pundits in glasshouses not being in any position to throw stones but I’d say that in this instance Tommy is probably right. Not that it really matters: sure hasn’t Spillane been up to the same crack for years?

Onto the Irish Examiner where on the Donegal side of the house they have pieces with Brian McEniff and Everton footballer Seamus Coleman while over on our side there are pieces with 1989 captain Jimmy Browne and a Q&A on the final with Enda Kenny.

I haven’t even got time to go into detail on what’s in the sports section of the Mayo News or the Connaught Telegraph but click on the links there and you’ll find the articles yourselves.

Right, that’s it – time waits for no man and his bicycle. An invigorating circuit up around Howth Summit and back is calling.